Cablevision Q4 Revenues And Subscriptions Hurt By Hurricane Sandy

The stock is down as investors discount the one-time $200M benefit to earnings, mostly from Dish Network’s payment to settle the breach-of-contract case involving the now-defunct VOOM collection of HD channels. That contributed to Cablevision’s net income of $116.6M in Q4, up 27.4% vs the end of 2011, on revenues of $1.66B, -1.6%. The top line figure is a little short of the Street’s expectation for $1.7B. Analysts likely are now computing how much earnings per share would have been without the one-time Dish payment; with it, Cablevision reports earnings at 45 cents a share, ahead of forecasts for 9 cents. The Long Island-based cable company says that Hurricane Sandy knocked out about 10,000 video, 9,000 broadband, and 7,000 phone customers. All told, Cablevision ended the year with 3.2M video subscribers (down 50,000), 3.1M broadband (down 5,000) and 2.4M phone (down 10,000). But ad sales were up 17.6%. “The enormous challenges of Superstorm Sandy had a strong negative impact on our fourth quarter results,” CEO James Dolan says. “Ever resilient, our employees met those challenges, restored our system and now are focused on continuing to enhance our product portfolio to meet our customers’ evolving needs and expectations.”